SEO Internal Links Revisited

Please read this ENTIRE email, address all listed issues, and reply to this email with your corrected code attached. It is required for you to read and reply to these emails, and failure to do so will result in significant delays with your plugin being accepted.

Also please remember in addition to code quality, security and functionality, we require all plugins adhere to our guidelines. If you have not yet, please read them:

When you include POST/GET/REQUEST calls in your plugin, it’s important to sanitize, validate, and escape them. The goal here is to prevent a user from accidentally sending trash data through the system, as well as protecting them from potential security issues.

SANITIZE: All instances where generated content is inserted into the database, or into a file, or being otherwise processed by WordPress, the data MUST be properly sanitized for security. By sanitizing your POST data when used to make action calls or URL redirects, you will lessen the possibility of XSS vulnerabilities. You should never have a raw data inserted into the database, even by a update function, and even with a prepare() call.

VALIDATE: In addition to sanitization, you should validate all your calls. If a $_POST call should only be a number, ensure it’s an int() before you pass it through anything. Even if you’re sanitizing or using WordPress functions to ensure things are safe, we ask you please validate for sanity’s sake. Any time you are adding data to the database, it should be the right data.

ESCAPE: Similarly, when you’re outputting data, make sure to escape it properly, so it can’t hijack admin screens. There are many esc_*() functions you can use to make sure you don’t show people the wrong data.

In all cases, using stripslashes or strip_tags is not enough. You need to use the most appropriate method associated with the type of content you’re processing. Check that a URL is a URL and don’t just be lazy and use sanitize_text please. The ultimate goal is that you should ensure that invalid and unsafe data is NEVER processed or displayed. Clean everything, check everything, escape everything, and never trust the users to always have input sane data.

All plugins must have unique function names, defines, and classnames. This prevents your plugin from conflicting with other plugins or themes.

For example, if your plugin is called “Easy Custom Post Types”, then you might prefix your functions with ecpt_{your function name here}. Similarly a define of LICENSE would be better done as ECPT_LICENSE. You can use namespaces instead, however make sure that those also are unique. A namespace or class of ‘MyPlugin’ is NOT actually all that unique.

This extends to anything in a define. For example, if you were to use this, it would be a bad idea:

define( ‘PLUGIN_PATH’, plugins_url( __FILE__ ) );

That define is a global, so PLUGIN_PATH could conflict with a number of other things.

Don’t try to use two letter slugs anymore. As of 2016, all the good ones are taken. Instead consider easy_cpts_ (from the first example).

Similarly, don’t use __ (double underscores), wp_ , or _ (single underscore) as a prefix. Those are reserved for WordPress itself. You can use them inside your classes, but not as stand-alone function.

Please update your plugin to use more unique function and class names.

Some examples from your plugin:

function insertspecialchars
function str2arr

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Please make sure you’ve addressed ALL issues brought up in this email. When you’ve corrected your code, reply to this email with the updated code attached as a zip, or provide a link to the new code for us to review. If you have questions, concerns, or need clarification, please reply to this email and just ask us.

(While we have tried to make this review as exhaustive as possible we, like you, are humans and may have missed things. As such, we will re-review the ENTIRE plugin when you send it back to us. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this.)